


That other girl

by Elmothien



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:10:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5024230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elmothien/pseuds/Elmothien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In silence she's hearing Harbinger’s mocking voice and it’s driving her insane. Or maybe she’s already insane since she’s hearing it in the first place. You will fail, she hears, mechanical monotone echoing in her head. You might have prevailed in fight, but stupid decisions of your superiors and damn bureaucracy will eventually screw you.<br/>Granted, Harbinger would have phrased it better, but Shepard isn’t that great at imitating someone else’s style.</p><p>Shepard doesn’t feel especially victorious after defeating Collectors and needs to do something about it. </p><p>Beginning of Mass Effect 3 (spoiler up to the ME3 intro), Kaidan/fem!Shepard in the background, mention of past Shepard/Thane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That other girl

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my tumblr: http://narbeleth.tumblr.com/post/127652300998

In silence she’s hearing Harbinger’s mocking voice and it’s driving her insane. Or maybe she’s already insane since she’s hearing it in the first place.

 _You will fail_ , she hears, mechanical monotone echoing in her head _. You might have prevailed in fight, but stupid decisions of your superiors and damn bureaucracy will eventually screw you._

Granted, Harbinger would have phrased it better, but Shepard isn’t that great at imitating someone else’s style.

 ...

She quickly comes to conclusion that silence won’t do. She could listen to music or some show or watch a Blasto movie, but instead decides to fight insanity with more insanity and turns on the news.

And boy, aren’t they fascinating.

Okay, she thinks, looking at a screen, I can deal with it. There  _could be_  some useful information in this shitstorm. Whereabouts of the crew, some clue if Reapers aren’t already up to something nasty.

She doesn’t see anything useful. What she sees, is her own face, plastered all over the news with every sort of annoying titles and leads imaginable – and few far beyond her imagination. They can be summarized pretty quickly – disgraced Commander Shepard and The Bad Things She Has Done.

The bullshit effectively shuts Harbinger up, but Shepard continues watching, telling herself, not without a reason, that she doesn’t have anything better to do. Anyway, another reasonable explanation, she prefers to learn as much as she can before brass decides that allowing her access to public news channels is too dangerous.

But the truth is, she’s got hooked.

She watches one program after another, looks at her own face and listens about a woman who saved the Citadel, but then lost her way, a woman who discovered malicious ploy against the Council, but then get manipulated by a dangerous organization, a woman who stopped Saren long time ago, but then became a traitor and a terrorist herself. She hears a lot of “but” and few “however” when journalists try to be more sophisticated. What she doesn’t hear is any “and”, any story about a woman who stopped one threat and died and was resurrected, who faced another danger and was ready for the next fight. It’s always a life cut in a half, two opposite episodes, not a life of a person who gets to lead it – for better and for worse – with any kind of continuity, even in their mistakes. And Shepard starts to think -- maybe they got it right. Maybe such person simply doesn’t exist

 She’s looking at that face, almost identical to the one seen in a mirror and feels more and more disconnected, as if she’s looking at a stranger every time her story graces – sorry, disgraces – TV news and it disgraces news all the fucking time. One morning, after a stream too many, she finally has enough, tries to shut extranet down, but it only freezes with her photo on the screen, because why a damn terminal should be nice to her. It’s some old photo, taken in the Presidium after the first attack, after Ilos. It is a photo of a person who had saved Citadel – but, she realizes, a person who stopped the Collectors had eyes glowing in the dark and  set of creepy, red scars; and her every feature, even if identical to ones the woman in the photo wears, was created in a Cerberus’ laboratory by an uneven combination of scientific miracle and Miranda’s sheer stubbornness. Maybe there is no “and” between them.  


Because she is  _clearly_  fucking insane, Shepard tries, as a mental exercise, to imagine if Kaidan felt the same looking at her on that godforsaken colony, if he had this feeling of usurpation. Familiar face on a total stranger, only he had it in reverse, one more thing dividing them right now. Not that it matters.

And maybe she’s just fed up or maybe thinking about Kaidan – she was avoiding it for a reason, after all – finally does it, Shepard starts to dislike that woman on the news, despise how alike, how bloody identical, they look. She regrets that, on their way back to Earth, she finally let Doctor Chakwas remove the scars, they would do nicely as a visual distinction. Calling the Illusive Man and asking him for another rebuilt doesn’t seem to be a very sensible idea, considering how they parted ways, smoking Collector base, stolen ship, Miranda running off and all that shit. A plastic surgery probably wouldn’t fly with the brass – besides, it’s not what she wants. For once in her life she doesn’t need to go all in, to make some drastic move, to burn a bridge and let it light the way, if only because she doesn’t have enough energy left. She just needs to  _know_  that she owns a reflection in the mirror, screw that bitch yet another reporter calls fallen hero. She needs to own her face.

 ....

Because Shepard is a woman with an uncanny ability to finding solutions, she finds one. Quite simple, at that.

Make up.

She goes extranet-shopping instantly and gets a little carried away. Choosing right lipstick color and realizing that nope, for once it’s not a fucking dilemma, she can have them both and another twenty others as she pleases, beats going crazy over stupid publicity anyway. She buys half of a stock of mineral eye shadows from a shop she remembers Ashley mentioned lifetime ago, when she was choosing birthday gift for her sister. She gets eyeliner she saw laying on Miranda’s desk, between pile of Cerberus reports. She tries to remember how the face powder Kasumi gave her for a Hock’s Heist Party was called and finds a very fine variety of blushes in the process. She orders it all, along with rich collection of nail polish bottles. Quite probably, there won’t be enough time to try all this stuff before the Reapers decide they’re done waiting and it’s such a cherry thought to buy your cosmetic products with.

Since the world is ending anyway and she’s got nothing to lose, she orders a pack of a red hair dye too, deciding that a little of her usual radicalism won’t hurt. 

Her order apparently baffles an officer responsible for her safety – meaning an officer who gets his bills paid by checking if Shepard isn’t smuggling explosives in her favorite cereals and tampons, two things she doesn’t trust any unknown, overly helpful man to  _get for_ her – and it’s delayed for a week. She gets emails apologizing for the inconvenience with a vague explanation of the unforeseen complications. Well, at least a thought of Alliance soldiers debating what ulterior motive lies in a bag of mascaras recommended by the asari information broker and randomly chosen eye shadows is the most gleeful one Shepard’s had for weeks. Months maybe.

Nope, don’t go there.

Her package finally arrives, minus polish remover and Kasumi’s powder, plus information about safety regulations. Shepard rolls her eyes and goes straight to the bathroom. Funny enough, a hair dye made it past the security and with it Shepard begins, massaging red dye into her soon-not-black hair. Formula is sufficiently strong, another miracle of modern science, but it’s taking freaking forever and Shepard can’t remember last time she was eagerly waiting for something so not important in the grand scheme of things.

She deems the final effect worth the waiting, though.

Next time she switches news on, The Disgraced Commander Shepard’s face doesn’t exactly please her – antipathy disappears and she feels for that woman who tried her best for so many people and didn’t even receive a benefit of the doubt from overwhelming majority of them, some of her friends included  - but it doesn’t bother her so much anymore. Shepard had to learn how to recognize lost cause when she sees one.

She can’t help woman on the news, so she let it go. Okay, she thinks, trying to rub nail polish off her skin. They can have her.

 ....

To the next debrief she has to attend, Shepard goes well prepared with her eyes done quite masterfully (is she’s to judge) done and nails in red and white.  

Anderson looks at her skeptically, maybe he suspects that putting on mascara and turning ginger have to be a crucial step in some evil masterplan. He rolls his eyes when, after the meeting is conjured, after repeating the same shit for tenth time, Shepard asks if they could reconsider withholding the items she requested, thank you in advance, sirs, madams. They look like they didn’t expect she’d ask. As if telling members of the galactic Council to screw themselves takes less nerve than requesting a stupid polish remover. As if, after surrendering her ship and going patiently from one pointless meting to another, she has just showed first sign of true resistance by wanting to powder her face and now they expect troubles.

‘I promise not to kill any batarians with it’, she snaps. She can’t think of a better way to let them know she’s not starting any revolution.

But she would have troubles coming up with worse one, too.

Okay, she thinks, looking at herself in the mirror that evening. News channel plays in the background and excels at the art of providing none useful information while creating an impression of journalistic business. Okay, she thinks, and put new layer of eye shadow on her lids. So those are war colors. Okay, I can work with that.

Effect isn’t as masterful as before, but it’s only because she doesn’t go anywhere else tonight and doesn’t care. Trembling hands have nothing to do with it.

 ....

In the morning she receives a small package with a hand-written note. She recognizes a name it’s signed with – a stern looking Captain who’s sitting in the corner. She rarely asks any questions and cuts through the bullshit any chance she gets.

 _Commander,_ note says,  _I took a liberty of looking at your recipe. There are most economically sufficient ways to blow batarians up, so please don’t waste this marvelous product on making a bomb._

For the first time since her not so triumphant return to Earth, Shepard smiles.

A talking head on her screen starts blubbering and Shepard turns the news off.

_...._

Her hair grows longer and longer and Shepard doesn’t do anything about it. She’s had her favorite military haircut for years now, she has it in every damn photo taken since she has joined the Alliance – and she welcomes another thing making her a bit different. She still goes to debriefs and explains her actions over and over again and no one ever mentions she’s way past the regulation length. They don’t have problems with mentioning loads of other stuff though, her affair with a certain drell assassin she’s no longer allowed to talk to included, and she strongly suspects that it’s a clear sign that they’ve already reached their decision. She’s not returning to active duty any time soon.

Okay, Shepard thinks, looking through a window at a Vancouver’s overrated view. Fuck them. The thought lacks any vehemence. She’s sick of the meetings and tired of admiralty’s stupid poses, but she got what she expected. And it’s her own damn fault. She should have taken Jack’s advice and make Normandy the ultimate pirate spaceship. At the very least, she should have listened to Garrus and set up an anti-Reapers campaign somewhere in the Terminus System. One ship couldn’t stop the invasion, of course, her argument was very valid – but it  _would be_ more help than endless talking and questioning and ethical points and summarization of all the doubtful decisions and weighting the severity of the threat with the serious errors in judgments oh so dangerous in commanding officer’s case. She doesn’t know what she was trying to accomplish…

Only she does. She was trying to act all Alliance.

Before they hit the Collectors’ homeworld, last thing she did was look at Kaidan’s damn photo in her cabin and apparently she mistook herself for a photography too, in the process.  She was trying to be that other girl, that tanned girl with military haircut she kept all the way through Terminus System and Omega 4 Relay. Shedding off the Cerberus uniform that never fit right anyway wasn’t such a bad idea, but she should have known getting rid of the scars wouldn’t make Alliance recognize her as one of  _theirs_ again. Shepard they trusted, Shepard that saved them is, quite literally, dead and apparently they don’t feel any obligations towards the resurrected version, whoever she is.

Yeah, they needed her intel, but a meticulously detailed report would suffice.

Stupid cow, she thinks, looking at the dark monitor of her laptop, trying to remember exactly what she thought was going to happen. What she counted on.  _Who_ she counted on.

Her terminal buzzes and she reaches for it, sure it’s the shop, informing her of yet another delay in her latest order. Her roots are starting to show and the only lack of judgment she can truly admit to is neglecting to buy an emergency packet in advance.

But no, it’s an official Alliance email very officially informing her that after official investigation brass reached their final and official decision and yep, she’s not going to active duty. Officially. She’s not going to prison, either, so maybe she should look at the bright side. Anderson would surely tell her that.

Shepard turns in the news this evening, first time in weeks, curled up with a blanket on her sofa. Of course, media vultures are already covering her – finally confirmed – fall. Shepard supposes she should be grateful for getting the message first.

‘Stupid cow’, she tells the girl in the news, with great satisfaction noticing that they’re not identical.

And damn, she would have been smarter.

 ...

A week later she sees Kaidan for the first time since Horizon.

She looks at him and talks with him and their unsuccessful love affair sure as hell is not the most important thing in the picture right now, so she keeps her priorities straight. She can’t deny an obvious, though: fuck, she could change all she wanted, but Shepard The Original, Shepard The Potentially Evil Clone and whatever Shepard she is now still have few things in common. Favorite cereal, the side she sleeps on, earworms that drive her crazy, Kaidan Alenko.

Oh, and the eagerness to kick Reapers’ collective ass.

‘You know the Commander?’, James asks, curiosity and bit of respect in his voice.

‘I used to’, she hears Kaidan’s reply and closes her eyes for half of a second. Then she catches her reflection in the window, red, long hair and paler skin and thinks back to the time she saw that photo, frozen at her screen. He used to know that one, a girl who is by now mostly invented out of thin air.

Okay, Shepard thinks, fair enough. Okay. Let him have her.


End file.
